A Belated Retrospective for a Bauhaus Artist

Hannes Beckmann, a Bauhaus-trained painter who was also a photographer and stage designer, narrowly survived World War II. He fled his native Germany, ended up imprisoned in Czechoslovakia and lost much of his artwork along the way. After tracking down some of Mr. Beckmann’s surviving works in recent years, David Hall, an art dealer in Wellesley, Mass., is opening a retrospective on Monday.

During the war, Mr. Beckmann and his wife, Matilda, a Czech sugar heiress of Jewish ancestry, were accused of espionage and arrested. He was eventually sent to a penal camp and Matilda to a concentration camp.

In 1945, their son, Tomas, was killed in an accidental bombing by American warplanes; while flying in thick clouds, the pilots said they had mistaken Prague for their intended target, Dresden.

The show, at David Hall Fine Art (with artwork priced from $1,000 to $50,000), contains Cubist and Constructivist set designs in jewel tones and abstract photographs of glassware and water droplets.

It also covers Beckmann’s Op Art acrylic canvases, produced after he and his wife moved to the United States in the late 1940s. (They later divorced.) Here, he was a photography curator at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later renamed the Guggenheim) and taught art at Cooper Union, Yale and Dartmouth.

He based his Op Art patterns on methodical studies of optics and neurology. In the exhibition, Mr. Hall said, one swirl of yellow and gray forms “shows how a triangle can be sinuous and lyrical and change your perception; you don’t even realize you’re looking at triangles.”

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A work by Anton Cepka.CreditDallas Museum of Art

After Beckmann died in 1977, at 67, his daughter, Cathy, stored his artworks and archive. Until Mr. Hall contacted her about the estate in 2008, she said in an interview, scholars and dealers had shown little interest in Beckmann’s work.

“People told me, ‘Well, your father’s just not important enough,’ ” she said.

Institutions had acquired some of the family’s paperwork over the years. The Getty Research Institute owns 11 letters that Kandinsky wrote to the Beckmanns in the 1930s. The couple pleaded for help escaping Prague, and Kandinsky, who was living in Paris, tried to find them sponsors overseas.

“The Devil is taking delight in human stupidity,” Kandinsky wrote them in 1937.

Mr. Hall and the Czech historian Bronislava Rokytova are working with European and American experts on a Beckmann monograph, due in 2017.

In a recent issue of Umeni/Art magazine, Ms. Rokytova wrote that even when Beckmann was impoverished and persecuted in Prague during the war, he carried around a camera, in case he felt inspired:

“He experimented with solarization, deliberate overexposure, and heightened contrast of the image or double negatives, especially in photographs of modern Prague architecture and completely abstract graphic photo work.”

CACHE OF JEWELS IN DALLAS

The Dallas Museum of Art has received a gift of about 700 pieces of 20th-century jewelry that the Viennese dealer Inge Asenbaum collected partly by venturing behind the Iron Curtain.

Ms. Asenbaum, 90, traveled widely to research and promote artists including Ewa Franczak, a Polish jeweler known for squiggles and flame shapes, and Anton Cepka, a Slovakian metalworker whose jewelry resembles insects, aircraft and skyscraper frames. (A Cepka retrospective runs through June 7 at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, with a catalog from Arnoldsche that includes images of some Asenbaum pieces.)

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Simeon Solomon’s “The Passover.”CreditSimeon Solomon

At Ms. Asenbaum’s gallery, her wares surprised people. “Vienna is a quite conservative town,” her son Paul Asenbaum, an art historian, said in an interview. The gallery collection, he said, “is sculptural pieces; it’s conceptual art; it’s kind of flying saucers; it has its own world.”

Ms. Asenbaum sold the collection and related paperwork for an undisclosed amount to the Dallas philanthropists Edward W. and Deedie Potter Rose, who donated it to the Dallas museum. (Ms. Rose is a former chairwoman of the museum.)

The museum is planning to publish and exhibit the pieces, and a few dozen will be on view in the next month or so. Kevin W. Tucker, the museum’s senior curator of decorative arts and design, said jewelry displays fascinated visitors. “It has the sort of vicarious aspect of, ‘How would it look on me?’ ” he said.

THE SOLOMONS REVISITED

The pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Simeon Solomon’s career was ruined after he was arrested in 1873 on suspicion of attempted sodomy; he was caught with a male lover in a London urinal and subjected to invasive medical tests.

“The humiliation is just unimaginable,” said Roberto C. Ferrari, a Columbia University curator who will lecture on Solomon at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Dahesh Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Dr. Ferrari and the British historian Carolyn Conroy maintain a website, simeonsolomon.com, which documents Solomon’s briefly famous portraits, allegorical scenes and religious paintings. It details his connections to better-known figures like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones and reports recent sales. Last year at a Bonhams auction in Los Angeles, a book of Solomon’s love poems that he had inscribed to the writer Algernon Charles Swinburne brought $17,500. (The buyer, Mark Samuels Lasner, has lent it to the University of Delaware library.)

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Nan Mason took this photo of herself and her partner Wilna Hervey in 1971.CreditHistorical Society of Woodstock; Joseph P. Eckhardt

The website and the coming lecture also cover Solomon’s even more obscure siblings, Abraham and Rebecca, who were renowned painters in their day as well.

In the 1860s, Rebecca’s works were exhibited alongside Whistler paintings. “She was much better known then than he was,” Dr. Ferrari said.

WOODSTOCK LOVE STORY

From the 1920s to the ’70s, Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason, an artist couple who spent much of their time in Woodstock, N.Y., not only hosted numerous fund-raising parties but also painted landscapes and portraits, acted in plays and silent films, photographed each other, bought real estate, designed gardens, and made enameled plaques and candles.

“They got an astonishing amount done,” the historian Joseph P. Eckhardt said. “Their reaction to the sun coming up was, ‘What do we want to do today?’ ” Their love story is detailed in Mr. Eckhardt’s new book, “Living Large: Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason,” published by WoodstockArts.

Mr. Eckhardt is also affiliated with the Betzwood Film Festival at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pa., which will screen a selection of Hervey’s films on May 9.

Hervey, like Mason, was about six feet tall, and was typecast in slapstick movies, playing a befuddled strongwoman who could hoist trolleys, train tracks, telephone poles and clotheslines, “breaking everything but a sweat,” Mr. Eckhardt writes.

The couple remained devoted to each other through their many career phases, in an artists’ colony not known for stable relationships.

“They were kind of conventional in an unconventional community,” he said.